May 30, 2009

May 29, 2009

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The piece is also an attempt to think more deeply about things we talked about at the conference on tinkering that Anne Balsamo organized last year (and I continued thinking about in other venues).

[To the tune of Elvis Costello, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," from the album The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions (I give it 2 stars).]

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of stuff: biking, organizing a Memorial Day dinner, preparing for a week-long trip to the East Coast, thinking about the craft and design of workshops. (These are the expert workshopsthatIorganizeallovertheplace.)

In many ways these are very different activities, but I really enjoy them all. I recently realized that despite their differences, they actually share a few qualities.

1) They're active, embodied knowledge.

Obviously bicycling is physical, but cooking is a nice combination of fine motor skill and lifting big heavy things (or in my case, avoiding setting myself on fire); you're always on your feet in a workshop; and travel is pretty physically strenuous, for good and bad reasons. Maybe I'm getting older, I'm less of a couch potato, or my ADD is increasing (and I know these are somewhat mutually exclusive explanations), but I find my patience with sitting for long hours and just reading is decreasing. I can do it, but I'm happier engaging my body. And nothing is better than activities where you're involving your body, but you have to think about what you're doing. (Gregg Zachary had a great piece last year on the rediscovery of the virtues of manual work. I'm part of a movement.)

My capacity for finishing things that have open-ended deadlines, or fake deadlines ("so we all agree that we'll finish our tasks by next week, right? right?"), is plummeting to near zero. I have too much other stuff in my life that absolutely has to get done.

So hard deadlines are good for me now. Essential even. The workshop starts at exactly this time, the plane leaves at exactly that time, the guests are arriving now.

Hard deadlines also put a nice bound on craftwork, by preventing you from tinkering forever with something. A paragraph could always be better, but as Sennett writes, the demands of the trade force craftsmen to accept limits, to do the best job they can within the time they have, and to learn to be satisfied with that. As graphic designers say, "Finished is Good."

3) They require preparation.

The day of the cookout, I spent hours chopping vegetables, checking marinades, cleaning off platters (you can never have too many platters at a BBQ), locating plates and cups, setting up staging areas for food and drinks, laying out tools, etc. (I noticed, though, that this wasn't tedious, it was pleasant. It was a classic example of what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.)

Likewise, when you travel, you've got to think a lot about what to pack, how to structure your time, how to get among different places, etc.. A bike won't work with a flat tire, nor will a cyclist work if he's dehydrated, so you'd better be prepared for those possibilities. Every ride requires some kind of adjustment: technical climbs mess up gears; thorns flatten tires; I get hungry. Having the resources to deal with those things lets me keep riding.

With workshops, you have to think in advance about everything, and I mean everything: you have to go over the agenda minute-by-minute, think about the flow of the day, tinker with questions and exercises to eliminate ambiguity and focus people, lay out materials, move the furniture around, make sure the caterers know when to appear, etc., etc. (Indeed, there are things that we normally don't think about that I'd like to start experimenting with, like lighting and ambient sound, making some activities more embodied and physical-- sitting is exhausting-- and playing with the day's menu to keep people from getting weighed down by muffins and too much coffee.)

Good preparation doesn't require you to think just about one thing. It requires you to think about a lot of different things, big and small; to think about timing and process; about division of labor; about contingencies and strategies. That's part of what makes it pleasant.

Some of that preparation is meant to help you keep things on track, and do things exactly the right way. But most serious preparation isn't about scripting. Rather, its about making it possible for you to adapt to whatever actually happens. I've never had a workshop run exactly the way I imagined it would: more people show up, they turn out to be interested in other things than we'd discussed before, the room isn't laid out the way we expected-- a thousand different things can go akimbo.

I used to think that the point of planning workshops in such great detail was so I'd have more control over them. Wrong. You never have control. You have whatever you have when you get in the room. The point of doing all that planning is to deeply understand the intentionality and philosophy behind the workshop, so you can improvise your way to the same end-point, and you have the tools at hand to do so.

[Update: I've realized that this is my complaint about humanities graduate training: it socializes you to believe that you possess skills that are useful only in a very specific future-- namely tenure track jobs in your field-- and train you to believe that you're less qualified to succeed at a different future, and that any other future is a failure.]

If you know that you're going to go off the map-- if events are going to conspire to send you in another direction, and they will-- the best that you can do is have the right gear, and a clear picture of where you want to go.

4) They have serendipity.

The upside of plans not working out the way you expect is that they can work out better. Sometimes the very coolest thing isn't on the map, and the only way to find it is to venture into the unknown.

One of the great pleasures of having a big party is that mixing up friends who don't know each other can have pleasant results for everyone. The best rides are ones that have a brilliant hill and view that you didn't know about. The best trips are the ones that expose you to something you've never seen before, or didn't even know was cool. I fell in love with Budapest not because I'd always wanted to go there, but because it's an amazing, complicated, Old World post-socialist place that I find alternately fascinating and frustrating. I love London because it rewards walking: I know it well enough to be able to navigate by Tube or on foot, but every time I go out in the evening I discover something-- a little square, a park, a row of businesses-- that charms and captivates, and that I'd never heard of.

Workshops have serendipity too. Tons of it. You want to build connections between ideas or fields that even experts hadn't seen before, or explore the cross-impact of trends that people normally think about separately. When that works, the results are awesome-- and the amazing thing is, the results are awesome a lot more often than you'd expect. You never know what the outcome of a workshop is going to be-- and if you do, there's really no point in having it in the first place. This doesn't mean that a workshop shouldn't have certain goals or deliverables; far from it. But it's like an evening walk in London: you know where you're going to end up, you know that there are certain landmarks you'll pass, but you don't know what else you're going to see along the way. Your job is to be open to the serendipity, so you can take advantage of it.

5) They draw out people.

I mean this in two senses. First, they can push you do things you didn't know you could. Good rides challenge you to do things you didn't think you were capable of, or leave you exhausted by happy with your performance.

Second, they open up a space for people to contribute. My wife used the cookout as an opportunity to repot a bunch of flowers in the backyard, dig out and repot some aging bamboo, and do other things on her gardening/home improvement list. Once kids started arriving, my daughter made (or taught the kids how make) balloon swords, which they then played with all evening. I hadn't thought of either of these, but people commented on how nice the backyard looked, and the kids all left exhausted and uninjured. Win.

Workshops require both kinds of drawing out. Running a workshop isn't an exercise in controlling other people, but it's a hard task to create a venue in which everyone can think seriously, think differently, and think together.

It's also not about getting a certain result, but about creating the conditions out of which interesting new things will emerge. Of course, workshops have objectives, but as a facilitator, you have to approach them obliquely, and recognize that the actual work and thinking will be done by participants: you're just ("just" isn't quite the right word!) there to help make it happen.

You can challenge people, but you can't order them to be innovative. You can try to get guests to mingle or introduce them to each other, but you can't make them be chatty and friendly. You can also push yourself, but you must recognize that pushing doesn't get you everything: you can get to the airport on time, but you can't control the weather and need to be able to go with whatever the situation presents.

my son on a happier ride

This morning I got an unexpected lesson on pushing versus flow from my son. We were biking to school, and he has the habit of standing up while pedaling. I can't get him to stop (he's seven, after all), so I was trying to teach him how to do it in a way that maintains his balance. He got frustrated and mad, which made him distracted; and so he took a spill. Bad enough to break the mirror on his bike, add a couple nicks to the brakes or handlebars, and require some ice and band-aids when he got to school. Fortunately nothing on him was broken, and he'll be fine.

As I try to tell the kids, biking is one of those things that demands mindfulness: you have to watch the road, know what gear you're in, know where the cars are, know how tired you are. You can push yourself, but if you lose your concentration-- if you lose the flow-- you're likely to crash. In the course of pushing him, I made him lose what little flow he had.

Still, any spill that doesn't send you to urgent care is a learning opportunity, not an accident. And as a friend of mine wrote after hearing about the crash,

But falling is an essential part of growth. It teaches you where the boundaries are. If you never push hard enough to fall, you will never know if you could grow twice as much or twice as fast-- because you are playing it safe.

So across all these activities-- and maybe across everything you do-- hitting that mix of pushing and flow, planning but staying open to serendipty, and being active is key.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Hourglass, Part 2," from the album Staircase (I give it 4 stars).]

May 26, 2009

I've recently been reading about craft--in particular Richard Sennett's dense but serious and amazing book, The Craftsman-- and so this quote from David Rakoff's Get Too Comfortable, sent to me by my colleague Jason, jumped out at me.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

May 20, 2009

A couple days ago at the library, I did my usual thing of checking out a couple CDs from familiar artists, and then one at random: Chantal Kreviazuk's "Colour Moving and Still." I still haven't popped in the Van Morrison or Joni Mitchell. I'm still listening to Chantal.

She's somewhat heavily under the influence of Alanis Morissette for much of the album, but even in this second release she's starting to break out on her own. You can especially hear that in this song, "Far Away," particularly in the soaring chorus, which really shows off her fabulous voice.

The video itself ... well, actually it isn't that good, if only because it's like a collision of indie / chanteuse / film school project / fashion model / road grrrl styles, and she never looks like she's really tearing into the song (and just close your eyes and listen-- she does tear into it). Still, I predict my daughter will sing this at the Peninsula rock concert next year, if she doesn't opt for Sarah McLachlan's "Worlds on Fire."

"Traditional thinking has held that it's best to make a public declaration, maybe even more than one. Enlisting others in your hopes will shore up your intentions, and motivate you to work toward your new-found goal. But is this folk wisdom sound? Psychologists have been exploring this question, and some recent studies are now raising doubts about the "going public" strategy. Indeed, it appears that some people may mistake the talking for the doing—and end up failing for lack of hard work."

"[C]onventional wisdom asserts that letting others know of your future plans makes you more likely to achieve them. There’s a logic behind this wisdom: speaking your intentions is an informal contract between you and your network. That contract creates accountability for your actions. The process makes some sense in theory. Yet the success involved in announcing your goals may not hold up in practice. As Wray Herbert explains, telling others of our goals may create a previously unforeseen barrier: ego inflation. In some situations, as recent psychological studies indicate, once we declare our goals to peers, colleagues, or friends, we think of ourselves in a different light. The informal contracts make us feel as if we’ve begun down the path to our goal, which can prevent us from taking further steps toward actually achieving it."

May 19, 2009

The kids are all running around, and the parents are all hanging out,
chatting. At this age each group more or less amiably ignores the
other. I love the kids getting older.

Camping is a big part of Peninsula education. I was skeptical of it at first-- I've not done a lot of camping, to tell the truth-- but the kids love it, and they DO learn a lot. By the time they're in 8th grade, they're planning the entire thing.

May 17, 2009

"A collaboration of NASA Ames Research Center, industry, and local universities is developing a fully-automated, miniaturized spaceflight system that provides life support and nutrient delivery, and performs assays for genetic changes E. coli. Flying multiple missions as a secondary payload using this low-cost approach will lead to better understanding of the biological effects of the spaceflight environment, particularly space radiation and reduced gravity, enabling countermeasure development, which is a critical need for safe long-duration crewed space missions and safe space tourism."

"After PharmaSat separates from the Minotaur 1 rocket and successfully enters low Earth orbit at approximately 285 miles above the Earth, it will activate and begin transmitting radio signals to two ground control stations. The primary ground station at SRI International, Menlo Park, Calif., will transmit mission data from the satellite to the spacecraft operators in the mission control center at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. A secondary station is located at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, Calif. When NASA spaceflight engineers make contact with PharmaSat, which could happen as soon as one hour after launch, the satellite will receive a command to initiate its experiment, which will last 96 hours. Once the experiment begins, PharmaSat will relay data in near real-time up to six months, to mission managers, engineers and project scientists for further analysis."

"As a follow on to the highly successful GeneSat-1 Mission, the Ames Small Spacecraft Division is collaborating with industry and local universities to develop the next generation fully-automated, miniaturized triple cubesat spaceflight system for biological payloads. The PharmaSat experiment and flight system will be designed to measure the influence of microgravity upon yeast resistance to an antifungal agent. PharmaSat implements PI guided science focused on questions key to countermeasure development for long-term space travel and habitation....

The use of low-cost, small-size, autonomous secondary payload concepts provides a means to study biological changes of fundamentally well-understood microorganisms and mammalian cells at the gene/protein level."

"Microgravity can impact living organisms in a variety of ways, and now NASA researchers want to find out how it affects pharmaceuticals. On May 5, a small satellite about the size of a loaf of bread will launch as a secondary payload on a U.S. Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket. Weighing in at about 10 pounds, the nanosatellite -- called PharmaSat -- houses a micro-laboratory with sensors that can detect the growth, density, and health of yeast cells. When NASA spaceflight engineers make contact with PharmaSat, which could happen as soon as one hour after launch, they will send a command to the satellite to initiate a 96-hour experiment, which involves administering an antifungal treatment to yeast cells at three dosage levels."

"KentuckySpace is a non-profit enterprise involving a consortium of universities and private organizations for the purpose of pursuing space-related education, R&D, small satellite design and launch operations."

"Nine years of work disappeared in five minutes yesterday when a NASA satellite crashed into the icy waters near Antarctica. Now climate scientists who worked on the ambitious effort to map the world's carbon dioxide are trying to figure out what comes next."

"We've created cheap academic life with the way the review system now works. You can effectively extinguish junior people, their ideas, and whatever threat they pose to your fiefdom—and you can do it with little risk or cost. You shouldn't be allowed to block an innovative idea anonymously, even if it's unlikely to work."

I've installed the script that puts my iTunes "currently playing" information at the bottom of blog posts. This was a standard feature with Ecto2, but it disappeared with Ecto3, and I never bothered to look for it. I'm glad it's back.

Back to work now. I'll reconfigure my style sheet later to take advantage of the class tags.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "The Boston Rag" from the album "Citizen" ]

"It's true that there's a lot going on in your life in middle age and you have little time for leisure. Fortunately, you're also at your peak in terms of competence, control, the ability to handle stress, and sense of responsibility. You're equipped for overload." (Quoted in Winifred Gallagher, "Midlife Myths," The Atlantic Monthly, May 1993)

May 12, 2009

"We analyze the temporal evolution of emerging fields within several scientific disciplines in terms of numbers of authors and publications. From bibliographic searches we construct databases of authors, papers, and their dates of publication. We show that the temporal development of each field, while different in detail, is well described by population contagion models, suitably adapted from epidemiology to reflect the dynamics of scientific interaction. Dynamical parameters are estimated and discussed to reflect fundamental characteristics of the field, such as time of apprenticeship and recruitment rate. We also show that fields are characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity."

"The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer."

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

May 08, 2009

"Members of CubeSat Team SJSU reach for the skies as they continue to build "ReadySat Go," a small cube-shaped satellite that will one day be launched into orbit. ReadySat Go, which will be about the size of a small Kleenex box, is a communications satellite. "The quickest way to say it is, it's an answering machine in space," said Eric Stackpole, a senior mechanical engineering major and the club president. "You send a message up and it records that message. Then when it flies over a different part of the Earth, it can send that message back down.""

In Fall 2007, Eric Stackpole had a crazy idea: what if a bunch of students, unguided by professors, decided to build a satellite... for fun? The result was CubeSat Team SJSU, a group of multitalented, multifaceted students at San Jose State University.

Our current project is ReadySat Go, a 1kg CubeSat satellite with store-and-forward capabilities, built with a "do more, with less" philosophy. Our goal is to find out for ourselves what it takes to make it into space, without the threat of failing grades or apathetic lab partners.

Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that the Bee Gees' work is under-appreciated these days, that people are too distracted by the falsetto singing and the disco beats-- which have hardened like an amber around a lot of good music-- to recognize the great craft underneath.

I just discovered a brilliant exception to this rule: Feist's cover of their "Inside and Out."

It may be even better than the original. Certainly it's one of those covers that is a really interesting mix of classic and very contemporary elements. Actually, it reminds me of the work of Japanese soul singer Misia, who for my money makes Celine Dion look (and sound) like Suzanne Vega:

[O]fficers answering a report of indecent exposure found an unclothed man and woman apparently having sex against a wall. The couple told police they'd been drinking.

[Oakland County, Michigan Republican Commissioner Kim] Capello tells WXYZ-TV he "started out with good intentions" when he began walking the woman home from a bar before his actions took a wrong turn.

This would be totally unexceptional were it not for that quote, which is a masterpiece of ambiguity.

Another article notes that "A 37-year-old woman was also involved, and a warrant has been issued for her arrest." It also has several unintentionally hilarious paragraphs on his committee assignments and legal practice areas.

Naturally, the local Democratic party issued its own statement, calling for his resignation on the grounds that "Rather than exposing our county to new job opportunities, Kim Capello has indecently exposed himself." It's just a tiny minefield of great little turns of phrase.

When someone who has really interesting taste tells me I'm wrong in an artistic judgment, I've found, it's smart to listen to them. So when a friend argued that ABBA's work is much better than I credited, I thought... well, actually I thought "That's nuts, but she was right about the whole Sagmeister thing, so let's give this a try anyway." So I loaded it only my iPhone, and switched it on while working on a report on technology use and distractibility (appropriately enough).

Once you kind of listen past the disco motifs-- which make it easy to dismiss what can be some great music, as I discovered a few years ago when I rediscovered the Bee Gees-- I started hearing some good stuff. This pretty much goes without saying, but if you wanted one really brilliant example of Europop, this would be it: the way they melded stylistic elements from across the Continent is actually pretty impressive. You might argue that this kind of mixing is inauthentic, but I'm hardly one to defend purity, cultural or otherwise: the world belongs to us hybrids, and perfect examples of cultural forms are only to be found in museums or under the microscope of dissertations. Vibrant culture doesn't work that way, and there's no reason balalaikas or pan pipes can't get along with Moog synthesizers and Stratocasters. (Though it's interesting that there's lots of Latin elements, but virtually nothing Celtic, which is now the great World Music Signifier Du Jour. I guess Ireland wasn't on the musical map in the 1970s the way it is now.)

More surprising to me is that some of the songs are better-written than I remembered. "One of Us" is very nice (I could imagine someone like Charlotte Martin doing a good cover of it, though of course she'd make it sound like Kate Bush had done it first), and "Dancing Queen," for all its apparent lightness, has a nice build to the chorus, and the lyrics are a bit more provocative than you might expect in a song whose chorus rhymes "seventeen" and "tambourine." None of it is music that I'd insist on turning off or forwarding through.

On the downside, I think the singing is not very strong at all: neither Agnetha Fältskog nor Anni-Frid Lyngstad had a great range, nor were they especially passionate performers, compared to, say, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks (to say nothing of the Dixie Chicks). Listening to "S.O.S." or "The Name of the Game," I don't really get a sense of them pouring much of themselves into the song. On the other hand, this may be a misunderstanding on my part: maybe they weren't ever trying to be Kate Bush or Tori Amos or Amy Winehouse (each of whom in their own way is absolutely distinctive, technically accomplished, and exudes a kind of take-no-prisoners attitude to their work), but succeeded brilliantly at being something else-- accessible and well-tuned to each other's sound. (It also turns out they didn't hate each other.) We can't all be Aretha Franklin. Maybe it was amazingly shrewd to not even try.

"Thank You for the Music" suggested something else to me: maybe I shouldn't listen to ABBA as disco or rock, but something more like theatre music. You'd have a hard time making a Broadway musical using Radiohead, but the way ABBA crafted its songs reminds me more of Les Miserables (or maybe some of the music in Cirque de Soleil, which I hold in pretty high regard) than anything. "Money, Money, Money" might as well have been written for the stage. (No wonder "Mamma Mia" is popular: for a song like "Dancing Queen," it's a very short distance from disco to stage-- where it always belonged in the first place.

The challenge is that this is music that's easy to dismiss today, but it doesn't deserve to be forgotten, any more than 19th century architecture deserved the fate it suffered at the hands of modern critics. In some ways, ABBA may be a bit like Mies van der Rohe's work or Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin:" well-done, but easy to copy very badly, and tarnished by time and poor imitation. (The distance from "Fernando" to those pan pipe guys whose work was advertised on UHF television stations is not great, but it's not necessarily ABBA's fault.) More generally, underneath the disco beats and big hair there was some serious music in that period, and particularly for those of us who grew up with it, it takes some effort to see what was good in it, rather than just what now seems ridiculous. For me, Duran Duran's best work is still irreplaceable: I defy anyone to listen to "Ordinary World" and not think it's sublime. The Bee Gees were brilliant songwriters, and their best songs-- I think of "Nights on Broadway," "Fanny Be Tender," "Run to Me"-- are beautifully crafted, passionate, and unforgettable. (The problem is that their sound was SO phenomenally distinctive, it made it hard for them to be copied: the whole falsetto thing was really easy to parody, and easier to ignore. If ABBA was the Mies of 1970s pop, the Bee Gees are Eero Saarinen.)

As someone said, you should never be too cool for your own past-- if only because your past, or pieces from it, may turn out to be cooler and more worthwhile than you remember. So the ABBA goes on the kids iPods. And it'll stay on mine.

The first year we came to the Spring Faire, my daughter was interested in the zip line, but didn't feel ready to try it herself. The next year, though, she went on it, and every year since. This year, she eve won a free second ride.

My son's bolder: he went on it at a younger age than his sister, and this year went on it half a dozen times (not cheap, but this is a once-a-year thing.

Recently I've been thinking about how parents and children are connected, and how watching children can illuminate aspects of ourselves, let us see capabilities that we don't normally pay attention to. I see myself as more of an athlete than I used to, after watching them in the pool at the Y; I also suspect I'm a more social animal than I believed myself to be (or in the immortal words of one of my daughter's friends, "I'm not an introvert. I'm very extroverted. I just don't like you very much"). It's not all positive stuff: when I deal with my son's outbursts, I know exactly where he's coming from, because I recognize his temper in myself, and the only difference is that I've managed to discipline it, but not eliminate it.

However, it's good to see your kids do something brave or impressive, and to believe that they might have inherited that talent from you. Of course, it's just as likely that they inherited it from their mother, or that equal measure of environmental and genetic factors shape their personalities. Still, it's a useful way to think about your own interests and capabilities, to give yourself the freedom to try out (and succeed at) new things, and to assume that you have a natural ability to this new thing. After all, if the kids can do it, so can you.

It's interesting for me to reread what I wrote about the Fair in years past: I tend to see it as a concentrated dose of Peninsula culture, or an event that I can subject to an amateur thick description-- a ritual that shines a light on a whole world. And of course, there's face paint.

I've long appreciated the amount of time parents put into organizing and running it, but what strikes me this year is the degree to which the kids are also involved in putting on the Fair. My kids have always enjoyed going to the fair, but this year they were enthusiastic about going the day before to help set up, and of course going back the next morning. It seemed unthinkable to them that we wouldn't do setup-- which of course is just what made our going inevitable.

The school spends a lot of time talking about its distinctive culture, and arguing about how much we can (or should try to) describe it; however, what's missing from these discussions is a recognition of the basic fact that while the parents (and adults more generally) are indispensable to the running of the school, we may not actually be central to its culture. It's the kids who really own it. That's a slightly radical idea, especially for a bunch of intelligent of often pretty egocentric grownups who are used to creating and controlling things (welcome to Silicon Valley, where pride is our favorite of the Seven Deadly Sins). Certainly if you take an active, performative view of culture, we're but the chorus; and factor in the tacit knowledge that circulates among and is shared by the kids but never makes it to the grownups, and parents become rather peripheral.

The day before, we had been at Peninsula (at their insistence), setting up for the Spring Fair. My daughter was invited to come back the next morning to set out "no parking " signs around the neighborhood.

This is actually a nontrivial thing. One of the most important things any private school in the area has to do, from what I can tell, is not alienate the neighbors over parking. Every school seems to go to great lengths to make sure that clueless parents don't park in the neighbors during back to school night.

So the next morning I drove the kids over to school at 7:30. I had visions of dropping them off, making sure they were fine, then heading to a Starbucks. I didn't have any coffee before we left.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. First, we got the signs loaded into the truck, a battered old Toyota that looks like it's served the school about as long as internal combustion has been in existence. Then the kids climbed into the back, and after getting some friendly but very clear safety instruction, we were on our way.

At some point, jogging behind the truck, it occurred to me that I probably looked like the personal security detail for the first family of a Third World dictatorship, or a "freedom fighter" on my way to liberate a radio station in my nation's second-largest city. Though I left my AK-47 at home.

Of course, the kids had a fantastic time. Not only was it cool for them to drive around and throw things out of a truck; it was cool for me to see how readily and willingly they gave up their Sunday morning to work. I don't think they're motivated by loyalty, or the kind of impulse that sometimes moves me to do alumni interviews for my alma mater; it's something deeper, that doesn't involve as much calculation. With luck, they'll find other places in their lives that deserve this kind of investment, and reward it.

And I never made it to Starbucks, but it was okay. They had coffee at the Big Building.

May 04, 2009

"As a cognitive psychologist with a penchant for formal models, my long-standing research interests are in behavioral decision theory, including the areas of judgment, choice, probabilistic inference, and measurement."

"Geographers from Kansas State University have plotted the seven deadly sins of... the entire United States, using statistics for each county on crime, income, STDs, and other data. They call it “a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data.”"

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.